Florida Should Get Priorities In Order

JOHN GROGAN

If you need a reminder of how screwed up our priorities have become, just look at Florida's top public salaries.

In a state as desperate for vision and wisdom as ours, you would think the big money would go to attract the best and brightest, the people who could lead us into the next century.

A whiz-bang economist, say, to help Florida fix its terminally ill tax system. Or a gifted educator to pull our public school system out of the basement. Or perhaps a visionary growth planner to put the brakes on ugly urban sprawl without killing jobs.

But the big public-sector bucks don't go to any of those people. They go to a guy who teaches college jocks to throw a pigskin.

You guessed it. The state's highest-paid employee is Florida State University football coach Bobby Bowden, who already this year has raked in $218,441.

That's nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and the year's only half over. A quarter million dollars to play a game. And Bowden's pot will soon get sweeter. The university is putting together a million-dollar-a-year deal to keep him coaching the Seminoles for six more seasons.

A matter of worth

Compare that with the salary of Charles Reed who, as chancellor of Florida's public university system, is responsible for making or breaking the state's reputation as a place of learning. If Bowden is worth $1 million a year, the chancellor must make, what, three or four million?

Try again. Reed earned $97,517 in the first half of this year. Not bad pay, but if Charlie were smart, he'd forget academics and start working on his play book.

And guess who is the second highest-paid public servant? A highly regarded biologist perfecting a plan to save the Everglades? Nah. Try FSU basketball coach Pat Kennedy, who had made $218,005 by year's midpoint.

Those overblown salaries are more than twice the $101,764 that Gov. Lawton Chiles will earn all year. That's like IBM paying its chief executive a fraction of what it pays the company softball coordinator.

In fact, the coaches are paid substantially more than doctors teaching medicine in the university system. Talk about priorities.

A good chunk of the coaches' compensation came from private boosters, but explain that to the median Florida family making $32,212.

Our values are all out of whack.

What kind of message are we sending when a coach makes 30 times what a teacher makes? Can we blame so many young people for considering an education superfluous?

A reputation we don't need

Defenders of these outrageous athletic salaries will say it all boils down to supply and demand. A coach who wins can ask his price. A winning team promotes the university's reputation nationally, they say. A reputation for what? Putting athletics above academics? That's a reputation we can live without - unless, of course, the university system is bucking for a Nobel Prize in field-goal kicking.

A free marketplace may be fine in the private sector. If professional-sports fans want to support multimillion-dollar salaries through bloated ticket prices, that's their choice. But college ball is supposed to be different, or at least it started out that way.

Universities are about learning and the pursuit of knowledge. University sports should be a diversion, a break from the books, and nothing more.

If I were king, the priorities would be different. Teachers would earn the top dollars because the minds of the future are in their hands. Leaders and thinkers would follow close behind because they are the minds of the present.

Coaches would be well down the pay scale for the simple reason that what they do makes not a whit of difference. Whether they win or lose, in the end it's only a game.